Stories from the Lake: Commerce

06/22/09 5:20PM
Neal Charnoff, Lynne McCrea

Ferry service between Shoreham, Vermont and Ticonderoga, New York began in 1759.

(Charnoff) It's All Things Considered on Vermont Public
Radio, I'm Neal Charnoff.

Next
month marks the quadricentennial of Samuel de Champlain's arrival on the lake
that bears his name.

Today, our series "Stories
From the Lake" looks at how the growth of transportation at the turn of the 20th
century connected the people of Vermont, New York
and Canada.

(Shoreham Ferry)

We're traveling across Lake Champlain on the Fort Ticonderoga Ferry, which connects Shoreham, Vermont with Ticonderoga, New York.

Not only does the ferry
connect the two states, it serves as a bridge between travelers in the 21st
century and those of the 18th.

Utilizing a variety of
watercraft, this ferry route has been in service since 1759, making it one of the oldest
surviving business operations in the country.

The ease of transport on Lake Champlain was a major reason for growth along its shores.

Willard Sterne Randall is a
professor of history at Champlain College.

He says Lake Champlain enabled trade and commerce in the North Country.

(Randall) The
combination of rivers flowing into the lake and then the cheap easy
transportation in good weather at least north to Canada, or over to the other
side of the lake there was a lot of commerce with New York by ship, all the way
down into the 20th century.

Until the early 19th
century, wind-powered vessels were the main method of carrying goods across the
lake.

But
the arrival of steam powered transportation forever changed the pace of
commerce.

Rich Strum is the author of a
book about the Ticonderoga, one of three 19th century steamships that
serviced Lake Champlain.

(Tour)

Strum is giving a tour of the
Ticonderoga, which now rests on the grounds of the Shelburne
Musuem.

Strum says that while today
we don't think of steamships as being fast modes of operation, they
revolutionized not only the speed of travel on the lake, but the
direction. Sailors no longer had to rely
on wind direction to get from point A to point B.

(Strum) After
steamboats and again when the Champlain Canal opens in 1823, it really helps to
reorient trade southward and really connects this part of upstate New York with
the rest of the United States.

Steamships were first put
into use on Lake Champlain in 1809, just two years after their debut on the Hudson River.

The impact on commerce was
immediate, triggering the growth of Burlington as a major water port.

(Strum) You're
starting to be able to get goods from other parts of the country, they come
into the Champlain Valley, and then from the lake they work their way inland by
land transportation, but it does make more things available throughout not just
on the communities right on the lake.

For a time, commerce on the
lake was seasonal, with winter time travel limited to sleighs on the frozen
surface of that lake.

(Strum) That
really switches when the railroads start coming in the middle of the
century. Railroads enable commerce to
continue throughout the year, and not be dependent on whether or not the lake
is available for boats.

(Banjo music)

Railroads arrived in Whitehall, New York in the 1850's, and by the 1870's the railroad
stretched up the western shore of the lake, with Plattsburgh becoming the northern terminus.

By this time, commerce on the
lake was having a calming influence on territorial conflict.

Rich Strum says that making
money trumped making war.

(Strum) In the
19th century Lake Champlain serves much
more as a unifier than a divider of New York and Vermont and Quebec, because the
water is so crucial for transporting people and materials

In fact, what had once been a
vehicle for strategic battle was now also a romantic enabler.

(Strum) There
were a lot of cross-lake marriages, especially in the lower part of the lake
where it's not quite so wide. A farmer
in Bridport might take a wife from a farm family in Crown Point, and
actually some of that still happens today.

The ease of travel on and
around the lake also invited another influence on the Champlain Valley...French-Canadians, who were the figurative descendants
of Samuel De Champlain, and the settlements that he originally encouraged.

Susan Ouelette is a professor
of history at St. Michael's College.

According to Ouelette, the first wave of Canadian settlers in the Champlain Valley were refugees from the Revolutionary War.

The coming of the railroads
meant that friends and family could now easily travel from Montreal.

(French-Canadian music)

Ouellette says that
French-Canadians were hearing about the mills and lumber camps, and many came
south for the work.

(Ouelette) And
so there's not this really solid barrier that we think of. And in fact you have people who stay here for
awhile and then move back, or their children might come back down here.

Ouelette says that the
French-Canadian population began to outnumber Americans.

(Ouelette) In
the 19th century, especially the late 19th century, I
would say you would find somewhere's in the neighborhood of 60% of the
population that's either French Canadian born, or French Canadian and born
here.

While the French-Canadian
influence was rising, there was one group who were not included in this period's
growth...the native Abenaki Indians.

Fred Wiseman is a professor
of Humanities at Johnson State College. He specializes in Abenaki history and
culture.

According to Wiseman, this
was a period of social decline for the Abenaki.

(Wiseman) Probably
from the 1790's through the 1930's, the Vermont Abenakis
were basically required to go into hiding.

Wiseman says that Abenakis
were only accepted as healers, guides or craftspeople, but were otherwise
considered an ethnic threat.

(Wiseman) People
traveled on snowshoes made by Abenakis, they stored their goods in baskets made
by Abenakis, they traveled by birchbark canoes often made by Abenakis, and it
was ok to be Indian as long as you made these craft goods.

In the meantime, the growing
economy continued to have a strong impact on Lake Champlain. An expanding middle class would fuel the rise of
tourism, and families would travel the lake aboard the Ticonderoga.

We'll here more about that
next Monday, when our series "Stories from The Lake" continues.

Our
entire series and all of VPR's Champlain 400 programming can be found at
VPR.net

For
VPR news, I'm Neal Charnoff.

Our historical consultant has been Willard Sterne Randall, professor of history at Champlain College.